Cinematic gunfighting as an artform
Games don’t often feature real gunfights. The few that do – the ArmA series of military simulators, for example – make a commitment to verisimilitude that comes at the expense of accessibility, readability and fairness. This is because real gunfights aren’t easy, clear or fair. They’re confusing and lethal, and push into emotional spectra far beyond what’s appropriate for entertainment. Military simulators are rendered niche by their commitment to getting it ‘right’, while the rest of the industry assembles something resembling gun combat out of ideas that originate entirely with the videogame and not at all with reality: health bars, damage values and so on. These ideas reintroduce accessibility and fairness into the equation, enabling you to enjoy the drama of a gunfight without the mess.
Cinema has a similar problem and solves it in an equivalent way. A gunfight in an action movie is a performance, not unlike a musical interlude, and as such it has to adhere to principles of rhythm, tone and meaning to retain its effectiveness. A movie where bullets arrive from nowhere and key characters fall without warning would be unsatisfactory as entertainment. In both cases, something of the real drama of gun combat is lost to make the process palatable. Games lose a sense of risk and lethality in order to avoid presenting the player with frustrating instant-fail scenarios: a bullet is something you can shrug off with a magic syringe or a stint behind cover. Cinema tends to lose a sense of a gunfight’s unpredictability. Bullets go where it’s most dramatic for them for go and nothing is an accident.
Superhot is an abstract FPS remarkable for reclaiming some of this lost dramatic territory with a single, brilliant design decision. It’s a game entirely about gunfighting that’s unlike any other game about gunfighting that you’ve played. It doesn’t strive for realism, but it does encourage you to feel like you’re in the middle of a real fight, able to survive because of a single mechanic: time moves when you do. Looking about moves it forward only slightly; moving has a much greater effect, as does pulling the trigger. Each level presents a single gunfight, beginning often at the moment the first shot is fired and ending when the last enemy falls.
Though the game has evolved significantly since last year’s prototype, its vocabulary remains relatively simple. You can move, jump, fire and throw any object you’re holding. You can stun enemies with a thrown object or a punch and take their weapons, but every gun has a strictly limited clip. Bullets are physical objects in the world, inching forward with every step you take, and they’re always instantly lethal.
There’s a big difference between Max Payne-style bullet time and what Superhot does. The former slows down time but doesn’t give you control over it, meaning your enjoyment still needs to be protected by some of those traditional abstractions – health bars and so on. Here, your freedom to stop and consider your next move is a superpower that not only creates exciting combat encounters, but allows for a degree of finesse you usually only find in choreographed cinema.
You might begin a stage with an enemy right in front of you, gun levelled at your head. Your first action is to punch: time moves forward half a second, he staggers back, his pistol leaves his hand, frozen in the air. You take the pistol. You pull the trigger and fire: he continues to stagger, takes the shot to the chest. You move forward and as you do so another enemy fires from your left. You stop, time stops, and you turn to get a sense of the bullet’s direction. You take a single step back, then fire. Your enemy’s bullet misses your head by an inch; yours catches him before he can fire again. Another shot, behind you – you turn and repeat the process with another dodge and counter-attack. But this time you dodge too far, allowing time to move a little further along. You hear another shot, to your left, out of step with the shoot-dodge-shootdodge rhythm you’ve established. You turn. The bullet is hovering right above your eyes. You step, but not far enough. Game over.
Each stage is a puzzle that you solve through trial, error and occasional flashes of improvisational inspiration. You might practise until you can take down five gunmen surrounding you with a single balletic series of dodges and counter-attacks, or you might survive a lethal shot by throwing your gun at the bullet that would otherwise kill you. When you finish a stage, you’re shown a looping replay of your performance without the time-stopping mechanic. Regardless of how long you’ve laboured over your choices, suddenly you’re watching what looks like an incredible highlight reel of the world’s best FPS player or a scene from a John Woo movie: snap turns into instant headshots, bullets dodged by millimetres.
It’s tremendously evocative and this is helped rather than hindered by that abstract art style. Every environment is pure white; every enemy is built out of red triangles that flash and disintegrate on death. Black denotes objects that you can interact with, from guns to melee weapons to cups, cueballs and statues. From a mechanical perspective, this means you always know what your options are and where danger is likely to come from. From a tonal perspective, it means your imagination is encouraged to fill in the blanks.
This is the rule for the storytelling overall. At the beginning of each stage, a block-caps phrase is flashed across your vision: ‘IT’S A SETUP’. ‘YOU MISSED’. ‘MAKE THEM PAY’. These work with the environment to tell you everything you need to know about the scenario: a drug deal gone wrong, a raid on a meth lab, the climax of a vendetta. Each stage feels like a single scene from a Tarantino movie. They are effective out of context, but collectively fit into a cyberpunk metanarrative that’s worth leaving unspoiled.
Beyond the story mode you can play an endless variant of the game where enemies spawn until you’re taken down. The replays that result from this mode are particularly impressive: lengthy action-movie sequences rendered out of an exciting arcade game. Reaching score targets unlocks modifiers, like speeding up the rate at which time moves forward. These meaningfully change the types of fights you have, and the nature of the spectacle you create in cracking them.
Superhot’s brilliance lies in the way it infuses the dramatic quality of cinematic gunfights with the sense of chance, accident and triumph at which games excel. It expresses a completely different philosophy to a game like ArmA, making bullets seem deadly, making your choices matter, and making gunfights feel real.